This day last year page

[bigmac]

I think I have discovered a slight problem caused by where I host my website.
When I have started to run specific SQL queries, I noticed that incorrect data was being returned at certain times.
I have narrowed this down to the fact that Glovine host my website and they are 10 hours ahead of me in the UK.
So, when I run a query at say 11.00am UK time for Max temp for this day last year, the figure is correct, but if I run the same query at 8.00pm UK time, data is returned for "tomorrow last year".
Investigating this more, it is clearly to do with the time of the MySQL server, but I don't appear to be able to change this through the Glovine control panel.
I've tried several different methods of setting the timezone in my PHP script as suggested by Google searches, but none seemed to have any effect.
Has anyone encountered similar problems before?

[mcrossley]

Tricky because you always want the 'day' to be UK time, the server will be using ?Aussy time.

I'd use UTC date/time in PHP and in your SQL select statment and add the hour offset for BST - not sure if PHP can do that for you or you have to write your own routine to figure out if BST currently applies.

[mikechristelow]

Hi Steve

Can you give a link to an example of that? One of the things I was going to add was a set of web tags with daily stats (the sort of stuff that goes into dayfile.txt) that would be accessible via a "day=n" parameter (and "month=n" etc), so you could get a particular value for n days ago, up to a year ago (e.g. <#dailyhightemp day=365>); rather like the 'recent history' tags I introduced in build 1033. There have often been complaints that Cumulus was lacking in that sort of data compared to other software, and it took quite a bit of work to finally provide it. But it doesn't look like anyone was interested in it after all, so I put the "daily" version on hold.

I spent quite a lot of time creating a page to show today / yesterday / one year ago, with a lot of help from others! I was chuffed with the result which has served my purposes well. However, I'd also like to be able to show a version of the "today" dayfile values but for a specified historic date, which seems to be what you were referring to above. Is this still something you're considering (and does anyone have any existing means of doing this?)?

[steve]

Yes, it's still something I intend to add at some point; I don't know when that will be.